Popular body-worn gadgets such as smartwatches and rings have features to help you understand your sleep. Here’s our closer look at the data they provide and how much of it is actually helpful.
of American adults — spit out sleep-related figures meant to help us understand our time away from consciousness. The catch? Sometimes those numbers are presented without much context, which can make it tricky to understand how valuable they really are. And other numbers, like the amounts of time you spend in restorative “deep” sleep, are in some ways just educated guesses.
“Almost all of the commercial trackers are now really good at telling you what time you went to bed, what time you woke up, how much sleep you got and how awake you were,” said Joshua Hagen, director of the Human Performance Collaborative at Ohio State University. When professionals perform studies to properly dig into the quality of a person’s sleep, she says, they rely on sensors that directly monitor brain activity, eye movement, chin and leg muscle motion, plus much more. It’s only after researchers have collected all those readings over a full night that they go back and make determinations about, say, how long someone spent in each sleep stage.
And beyond that, Hagen from Ohio State says there isn’t a whole lot of definitive information about how to increase your deep sleep time, so stressing over that number isn’t really worth it.The verdict:If your heart rate is 60 beats per minute, it doesn’t beat precisely once per second — there are micro-scale variations in between those. Collectively, those little deviations make up your heart rate variability, which Hagen looks at as a “global stress indicator” that’s measured in milliseconds.
Those dips in HRV at night may help you suss out habits and practices you should cut out during the day. And checking out your HRV during the day could also give you a clearer understanding of how restful — or not — last night was.AdvertisementWearables like smartwatches and rings have gotten surprisingly good at measuring our breathing.
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